Volume 602 Issue 7895, 3 February 2022

There’s too much secrecy behind ARIA, the United Kingdom’s ambitious planned agency for high-risk, high-reward research funding.

Too many national leaders get good guidance yet make poor decisions.

By tinkering with the formula for soap bubbles, scientists create an orb that lasts more than a year.

Volcanic debris in a Greenland ice-core layer probably came from an Alaskan volcano instead.

The mammoth mammals can use each other’s ‘wheeze-honks’ to distinguish between neighbours and strangers.

The shift to clean energy is expected to drive the demand for aluminium, which is used in the frames and fittings of solar panels.

The monarchs of southeast Asian rainforests are ancient immigrants from Africa, by way of India.

The gap between average life expectancy and the number of years people are healthy and on the job is widening, with potentially grave consequences for pensioners.

Militants who occupied the centuries-old city of Hatra left behind artwork depicting hybrid camels.

The latest science news, in brief.

With Omicron or Delta outbreaks already in multiple provinces, scientists say next week’s Winter Olympics will present a major test of China’s zero-tolerance approach.

COVID vaccine boosters are proving a useful tool against Omicron, but scientists say that endless boosting might not be a practical or sustainable strategy.

The genetic variant probably comes from ancient wolves.

News of a ‘super variant’ combining Delta and Omicron spread rapidly last week, but researchers say it never existed and the sequences might have resulted from contamination.

The variant’s rapid spread, different vaccine strategies and varying levels of immunity worldwide make the pandemic’s future difficult to model.

Immunologists have raced to work out how to protect against multiple variants of SARS-CoV-2. Their research has yielded a wealth of insights and a few surprises.

The highly transmissible variant emerged with a host of unusual mutations. Now scientists are trying to work out how it evolved.

Palaeontologist of human origins, conservationist and politician.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change needs to do more to include the expertise and voices of women, even as numbers and policies improve.

Science benefits when junior scientists sign up as reviewers. It’s also good for their careers.

Software bugs are frustrating. Adopting some simple strategies can help you to avoid them, and fix them when they occur.

Geoff Gurr is working on an eco-friendly approach to controlling pests in New South Wales vineyards.

The identification of a specific subpopulation of immune-system T cells that drives type 1 diabetes provides insight into the development of autoimmune disease, and could point the way to new therapies.

Crystal-lattice vibrations reveal the mechanism by which laser pulses can strip a metal of its magnetism. The vibrations absorb the angular momentum of electrons in a sample, allowing it to demagnetize.

Genomic regions that are crucial for the viability and reproduction of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana are enriched with molecular features that are associated with a reduced rate of mutation.

Collisions between lead ions have produced the largest measured magnetic field in the Universe, enabling a search for elusive exotic particles that carry an isolated magnetic charge.

The essential properties of moiré materials and the progress and latest developments in the field are reviewed, and their fabrication and physics are discussed from a reproducibility perspective.

The Dog Aging Project is an open-data, community science study to identify genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors associated with canine healthy lifespan, generating knowledge that could readily translate to human ageing.

Measurement of the cosmic microwave background temperature using H₂O absorption at a redshift of 6.34 is reported, the results of which were consistent with those from standard ΛCDM cosmology.

At the Large Hadron Collider, the MoEDAL experiment shows no evidence for magnetic monopoles generated via the Schwinger mechanism at integer Dirac charges below 3, and suggests a lower mass limit of 75 GeV/c².

The creation of density-dependent gauge fields in an ultracold atomic system is described, leading to formation of domain walls that behave as elementary excitations and respond to electric fields, enabling a path to simulating gauge physics.

Ultrafast electron diffraction is used here to reveal in nickel an almost instantaneous, long-lasting population of anisotropic phonons with angular momentum.

A framework for selective sulfidation is proposed for the practical separation and enrichment of numerous metallic elements, to enable environmentally and economically sustainable metal processing.

The quantum contribution to friction enables the rationalization of the peculiar friction properties of water on carbon surfaces, and in particular the radius dependence of slippage in carbon nanotubes.

The solution-phase irreversible synthesis of a two-dimensional polymer with excellent elastic modulus and yield strength is reported.

Three-dimensional reconstructions of morphology and flight mechanics of the beetle Paratuposa placentis reveal adaptations that enable extremely small insects to fly at speeds similar to those of much larger insects.

Data on de novo mutations in Arabidopsis thaliana reveal that mutations do not occur randomly; instead, epigenome-associated mutation bias reduces the occurrence of deleterious mutations.

A strong association has been found between three regions of the Plasmodium falciparum genome and sickle haemoglobin in children with severe malaria, suggesting parasites have adapted to overcome natural host immunity.

Experiments in cerebral organoids show that sex hormones have a role in regulating the number of excitatory neurons in the human neocortex, providing insight into the mechanistic basis of sex-related brain differences in humans.

Using intracranial electrocorticography and a series of motor tasks, a speech planning network that is central to natural language generation during social interaction is identified.

Simultaneous recordings from hundreds of grid cells in rats, combined with topological data analysis, show that network activity in grid cells resides on a toroidal manifold that is invariant across environments and brain states.

The BAF chromatin-remodelling complex ATPase gene Brm safeguards cell identity during directed cardiogenesis of mouse embryonic stem cells.

Methicillin-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus appeared in European hedgehogs in the pre-antibiotic era as a co-evolutionary adaptation to antibiotic-producing dermatophytes and have spread within the local hedgehog populations and between hedgehogs and secondary hosts.

Serratus, an open-source cloud-computing infrastructure, can be used to screen millions of nucleic acid sequencing libraries at the petabase scale, and has enabled many new RNA viruses to be identified efficiently.

Evidence of a transcriptional signature that marks precursors of long-lived CD8⁺ memory T cells in SARS-CoV-2 infection.

A population of β-cell-specific autoimmune stem-like CD8 T cells initiates and sustains β-cell destruction and disease in a mouse model of type 1 diabetes.

Whole-genome sequencing of 1,013 clonal haematopoietic colonies from myeloproliferative neoplasms of 12 individuals reveals haematopoietic phylogenies and indicates that driver mutations are acquired sequentially, starting early in life.